Derrida_racisms Last Word

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Racism's Last Word

Jacques Derrida

Translated by Peggy Kamuf

Translator's Note.-"Racism's Last Word" s a translationof "LeDernierMotdu racisme,"which was writtenfor thecatalog of the exhibitionArt contre/againstApartheid.The exhibitionwasassembledbytheAssociationofArtistsof the Worldagainst Apartheid,headedbyAntonio Saura and ErnestPignon-Ernest, in co-operationwiththe UnitedNations SpecialCommitteeagainst Apartheid.Eighty-five of the world'smost celebratedartists contributedpaintings and sculpturetotheexhibition,whichopened n Paris in November1983. In addition,a numberof writersand scholarswere nvitedtocontribute extsfor thecatalog. "LeDernierMot du racisme" erves in particular to introduce the project of the itinerantexhibition,whichthe organizersdescribedbriefly n theirprefaceto the catalog:The collectionofferedhere willform the basisof a future museumagainstapartheid.Butfirst, these workswill bepresented n a travelingexhibitionto be receivedbymuseumsand otherculturalfacilities throughout he world.Theday will come--and our effortsarejoined to thoseof the internationalcommunityaiming to hasten that day's arrival-when the museum thusconstituted ill bepresented s a giftto thefirstree anddemocraticovernmentofSouthAfricato be electedbyuniversalsuffrage.Untilthen,theAssociationofArtistsof the WorldagainstApartheidwillassume, hrough heappropriatelegal, institutionalandfinancial structures, he trusteeship f the works.

A somewhatmodified ersionof "Racism's ast Word"wasoriginally ublishedin the bilingual catalog of the exhibition.

CriticalInquiry 12 (Autumn 1985)? 1985 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/85/1201-0007$01.00. All rights reserved.

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CriticalInquiry Autumn 1985 291APARTHEID-may that remain the name from now on, the uniqueappellation for the ultimate racism in the world, the last of many.May it thus remain, but may a day come when it will only be for thememory of man.A memory in advance: that, perhaps, is the time given for this ex-hibition. At once urgent and untimely, it exposes itself and takes a chancewith time, it wagers and affirms beyond the wager. Without countingon any present moment, it offers only a foresight in painting, very closeto silence, and the rearview vision of a future for which apartheidwillbe the name of something finally abolished. Confined and abandonedthen to this silence of memory, the name will resonate all by itself, re-

duced to the state of a term in disuse. The thing it names today will nolonger be.But hasn'tapartheid lwaysbeen the archival record of the unnameable?The exhibition, therefore, is not a presentation. Nothing is deliveredhere in the present, nothing that would be presentable-only, in to-morrow's rearview mirror, the late, ultimate racism, the last of many.

1THE LAST: or le dernier as one sometimes says in French in orderto signify "the worst." What one is doing in that case is situating theextreme of baseness, just as, in English, one might say "the lowest of the." It is to the lowest degree, the last of a series, but also that whichcomes along at the end of a history, or in the last analysis, to carry outthe law of some process and reveal the thing's truth, here finishing offthe essence of evil, the worst, the essence at its very worst-as if therewere something like a racism par excellence, the most racist of racisms.THE LAST as one says also of the most recent, the last to date ofall the world's racisms, the oldest and the youngest. For one must notforget that, although racial segregation didn't wait for the name apartheidto come along, that name became order's watchwordand won its title inthe political code of South Africa only at the end of the Second WorldWar. At a time when all racisms on the face of the earth were condemned,

Jacques Derrida, professor of philosophy at the Ecole des hautsetudes en sciences sociales in Paris, is the author of, among other works,Of Grammatology,Writingand Difference,Margins ofPhilosophy,and Dissem-ination. His most recent contribution to CriticalInquiry, "The LinguisticCircle of Geneva," appeared in the Summer 1982 issue. Peggy Kamufteaches French at Miami University, Ohio. She is the author of Fictionsof Feminine Desire.


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292 Jacques Derrida Racism'sLast Wordit was in the world's face that the National party dared to campaign 'fortheseparate developmentof each race in thegeographiczone assignedto it."

Since then, no tongue has ever translated this name-as if all thelanguages of the world were defending themselves, shutting their mouthsagainst a sinister incorporation of the thing by means of the word, as ifall tongues were refusing to give an equivalent, refusing to let themselvesbe contaminated through the contagious hospitality of the word-for-word. Here, then, is an immediate response to the obsessiveness of thisracism, to the compulsive terror which, above all, forbids contact. Thewhite must not let itself be touched by black, be it even at the removeof language or symbol. Blacks do not have the right to touch the flag ofthe republic. In 1964, South Africa's Ministry of Public Works sought toassure the cleanliness of national emblems by means of a regulationstipulating that it is "forbidden for non-Europeans to handle them."APARTHEID: by itself the word occupies the terrain like a concen-tration camp. System of partition, barbed wire, crowds of mapped outsolitudes. Within the limits of this untranslatable idiom, a violent arrestof the mark, the glaring harshness of abstract essence (heid) seems tospeculate in another regime of abstraction, that of confined separation.The word concentrates separation, raises it to another power and setsseparation itself apart: "apartitionality,"something like that. By isolatingbeing apart in some sort of essence or hypostasis, the word corrupts itinto a quasi-ontological segregation. At every point, like all racisms, ittends to pass segregation off as natural-and as the very law of the origin.Such is the monstrosity of this political idiom. Surely, an idiom shouldnever incline toward racism. It often does, however, and this is not al-together fortuitous: there's no racism without a language. The point isnot that acts of racial violence are only words but rather that they haveto have a word. Even though it offers the excuse of blood, color, birth-or, rather, becauseit uses this naturalist and sometimes creationist dis-course-racism always betrays the perversion of a man, the "talkinganimal." It institutes, declares, writes, inscribes, prescribes. A system ofmarks, it outlines space in order to assign forced residence or to closeoff borders. It does not discern, it discriminates.THE LAST, finally, since this last-born of many racisms is also theonly one surviving in the world, at least the only one still parading itselfin a political constitution. It remains the only one on the scene that daresto say its name and to present itself for what it is: a legal defiance takenon by homopoliticus, a juridical racism and a state racism. Such is theultimate imposture of a so-called state of law which doesn't hesitate tobase itself on a would-be original hierarchy-of natural right or divineright, the two are never mutually exclusive.This name apart will have, therefore, a unique, sinister renown.Apartheid s famous, in sum, for manifesting the lowest extreme of racism,its end and the narrow-minded self-sufficiency of its intention, its es-


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CriticalInquiry Autumn 1985 293chatology, the death rattle of what is already an interminable agony,something like the setting in the West of racism-but also, and this willhave to be specified below, racism as a Western thing.2

In order to respond to this singularity or, better yet, to fling backan answer, the singularity right here of another event takes its measure.Artists from all over the world are preparing to launch a new satellite,a vehicle whose dimensions can hardly be determined except as a satelliteof humanity. Actually, it measures itself against apartheidonly so as toremain in no measure comparable with that system, its power, its fantasticriches, its excessive armament, the worldwide network of its openly declaredor shamefaced accomplices. This unarmed exhibition will have a forcethat is altogether other, just as its trajectory will be without example.Its movement does not yet belong to any given time or space thatmight be measured today. Its flight rushes headlong, it commemoratesin anticipation-not its own event but the one that it calls forth. Its flight,in sum, is as much that of a planet as of a satellite. A planet, as the nameindicates, is first of all a body sent wandering on a migration which, inthis case, has no certain end.In all the world's cities whose momentary guest it will be, the exhibitionwill not, so to speak, take place, not yet, not its place. It will remain inexile in the sight of its proper residence, its place of destination to come-and to create. For such is here the creation and the work of which it isfitting to speak: South Africa beyond apartheid,South Africa in memoryof apartheid.While this might be the cape to be rounded, everything will havebegun with exile. Born in exile, the exhibition already bears witnessagainst the forced assignment to "natural" territory, the geography ofbirth. And if it never reaches its destination, having been condemned toan endless flight or immobilized far from an unshakable South Africa,it will not only keep the archival record of a failure or a despair butcontinue to say something, something that can be heard today, in thepresent.This new satellite of humanity, then, will move from place to place,it too, like a mobile and stable habitat, "mobile" and "stabile,"a place ofobservation, information, and witness. A satellite is a guard, it keepswatch and gives warning: Do not forget apartheid,save humanity fromthis evil, an evil that cannot be summed up in the principial and abstractiniquity of a system. It is also daily suffering, oppression, poverty, violence,torture inflicted by an arrogant white minority (16 percent of the pop-ulation, controlling 60 to 65 percent of the national revenue) on themass of the black population. The information that Amnesty International


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294 JacquesDerrida Racism'sLast Wordcompiled on political imprisonment in South Africa and on the wholeof the judicial and penal reality is appalling.'

Yet, what can be done so that this witness-satellite, in the truth itexposes, is not taken over and controlled, thus becoming another technicaldevice, the antenna of some new politico-military strategy, a useful ma-chinery for the exploitation of new resources, or the calculation in viewof more comprehensive interests?In order better to ask this question, which awaits an answer onlyfrom the future that remains inconceivable, let us return to immediateappearances. Here is an exhibition-as one continues to say in the oldlanguage of the West, "works of art," signed "creations,"in the presentcase "pictures" or "paintings," "sculptures." In this collective and inter-national exhibition (and there's nothing new about that either), pictural,sculptural idioms will be crossing, but they will be attempting to speakthe other's language without renouncing their own. And in order toeffect this translation, their common reference henceforth makes anappeal to a language that cannot be found, a language at once very old,older than Europe, but for that very reason to be invented once more.

3Why mention the European age in this fashion? Why this reminderof such a trivial fact-that all these words are part of the old languageof the West?Because it seems to me that the aforementioned exhibition exposesand commemorates, indicts and contradicts the whole of a Western history.That a certain white community of European descent imposes apartheidon four-fifths of South Africa's population and maintains (up until 1980 )

the officiallie of a white migration that preceded black migration is notthe only reason that apartheidwas a European "creation." Nor for anyother such reason: the name of apartheid has managed to become asinister swelling on the body of the world only in that place where homopoliticus europaeus irst put his signature on its tattoo. The primary reason,however, is that here it is a question of state racism. While all racismshave their basis in culture and in institutions, not all of them give riseto state-controlled structures. The judicial simulacrum and the politicaltheater of this state racism have no meaning and would have had nochance outside a European "discourse" on the concept of race. Thatdiscourse belongs to a whole system of "phantasms," to a certain repre-sentation of nature, life, history, religion, and law, to the very culturewhich succeeded in giving rise to this state takeover. No doubt there isalso here-and it bears repeating-a contradiction internal to the Westand to the assertion of its rights. No doubt apartheidwas instituted andmaintained against the British Commonwealth, following a long adventure


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CriticalInquiry Autumn 1985 295that began with England's abolition of slavery in 1834, at which time theimpoverished Boers undertook the Long Trek toward the Orange FreeState and the Transvaal. But this contradiction only confirms the occidentalessence of the historical process-in its incoherences, its compromises,and its stabilization. Since the Second World War, at least if one acceptsthe givens of a certain kind of calculation, the stability of the Pretoriaregime has been prerequisite to the political, economic, and strategicequilibrium of Europe. The survival of Western Europe depends on it.Whether one is talking about gold or what are called strategic ores, it isknown to be the case that at least three-fourths of the world's share ofthem is divided between the USSR and South Africa. Direct or evenindirect Soviet control of South Africa would provoke, or so think certainWestern heads of state, a catastrophe beyond all comparison with themalediction (or the "badimage") ofapartheid.And then there's the necessityof controlling the route around the cape, and then there's also the needfor resources or jobs that can be provided by the exportation of armsand technological infrastructures -nuclear power plants, for example,even though Pretoria rejects international control and has not signedany nuclear nonproliferation treaty.Apartheidconstitutes, therefore, the first "delivery of arms," the firstproduct of European exportation. Some might say that this is a diversionand a perversion, and no doubt it is. Yet somehow the thing had to bepossible and, what is more, durable. Symbolic condemnations, even whenthey have been official, have never disrupted diplomatic, economic, orcultural exchanges, the deliveries of arms, and geopolitical solidarity.Since 1973, apartheidhas been declared a "crime against humanity" bythe General Assembly of the United Nations. Nevertheless, many membercountries, including some of the most powerful, are not doing all that'srequired (that's the least one can say) to put the Pretoria regime in adifficult situation or to force it to abolish apartheid.This contradiction issharpest no doubt in today's France, which has provided more supportfor this exhibition than anywhere else.Supplementary contradictions for the whole of Europe: CertainEastern European countries-Czechoslovakia and the USSR, for ex-ample-maintain their economic trade with South Africa (in phosphoricacids, arms, machinery, gold). As for the pressures applied to Pretoriato achieve the relaxation of certain forms of apartheid, n particular thosethat are called petty and that forbid, for instance, access to public buildings,one must admit that these pressures are not always inspired by respectfor human rights. The fact is, apartheid also increases nonproductiveexpenditures (for example, each "homeland" must have its own policingand administrative machinery); segregation hurts the market economy,limits free enterprise by limiting domestic consumption and the mobilityand training of labor. In a time of unprecedented economic crisis, SouthAfrica has to reckon, both internally and externally, with the forces of


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296 Jacques Derrida Racism'sLast Worda liberal current according to which "apartheids notoriously inefficientfrom the point of view of economic rationality."2This too will have toremain in memory: if one day apartheid s abolished, its demise will notbe credited only to the account of moral standards--because moral stan-dards should not count or keep accounts, to be sure, but also because,on the scale which is that of a worldwide computer, the law of the mar-ketplace will have imposed another standard of calculation.

4The theologico-political discourse of apartheidhas difficulty keepingup sometimes, but it illustratesthe same economy, the same intra-Europeancontradiction.It is not enough to invent the prohibition and to enrich every daythe most repressive legal apparatus in the world: in a breathless frenzyof obsessive juridical activity, two hundred laws and amendments wereenacted in twenty years (Prohibition of Mixed Marriage Act, 1949; Im-morality Amendment Act [against interracial sexual relations], GroupAreas Act, Population Registration Act, 1950; Reservation of SeparateAmenities [segregation in movie houses, post offices, swimming pools,on beaches, and so forth], Motor Carrier Transportation AmendmentAct, Extension of University Education Act [separate universities], 1955;segregation in athletic competition has already been widely publicized).This law is also founded in a theology and these Acts in Scripture.Since political power originates in God, it remains indivisible. To accordindividual rights "to immature social communities" and to those who"openly rebel against God, that is, the communists" would be a "revolt

against God." This Calvinist reading of Scripture condemns democracy,that universalism "which seeks the root of humanity in a set of worldwidesovereign relations that includes humanity in a whole." It points out that"Scripture and History each demonstrate that God requires ChristianStates."The charter of the Institute for National Christian Education (1948)sets out the only regulations possible for a South African government.It prescribes an education

in the light of God's word ... on the basis of the applicable principlesof Scripture.For each people and each nation is attached to its own native soilwhich has been allotted to it by the Creator .... God wanted nationsand peoples to be separate, and he gave separately to each nationand to each people its particular vocation, its task and its gifts....


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CriticalInquiry Autumn 1985 297Christian doctrine and philosophy should be practiced. But we desireeven more than this: the secular sciences should be taught fromthe Christian-National perspective on life. ... Consequently, it isimportant that teaching personnel be made up of scholars withChristian-National convictions.... Unless [the professor] is Christian,he poses a danger to everyone.... This guardianship imposes onthe Afrikaner the duty of assuring that the colored peoples areeducated in accordance with Christian-National principles.... Webelieve that the well-being and happiness of the colored man residesin his recognition of the fact that he belongs to a separate racialgroup.

It happens that this political theology inspires its militants with anoriginal form of anti-Semitism; thus the National party excluded Jewsup until 1951. This is because the "Hebrewistic" mythology of the Boerpeople, coming out of its nomadic origins and the Long Trek, excludesany other "Chosen People." None of which prevents (see above) all sortsof worthwhile exchanges with Israel.But let us never simplify matters. Among all the domestic contra-dictions thus exported, maintained, and capitalized upon by Europe,there remains one which is not just any one among others: apartheidisupheld, to be sure, but also condemned in the name of Christ. Thereare many signs of this obvious fact. The white resistance movement inSouth Africa deserves our praise. The Christian Institute, founded afterthe slaughter in Sharpeville in 1961, considers apartheid incompatiblewith the evangelical message, and it publicly supports the banned blackpolitical movements. But it should be added that it is this same ChristianInstitute which was, in turn, banned in 1977, not the Institute for National,Christian Education.All of this, of course, is going on under a regime whose formalstructures are those of a Western democracy, in the British style, with"universal suffrage" (except for the 72 percent of blacks "foreign" to therepublic and citizens of "Bantustans" hat are being pushed "democratically"into the trap of formal independence), a relative freedom of the press,the guarantee of individual rights and of the judicial system.

5What is South Africa? We have perhaps isolated whatever it is thathas been concentrated in that enigma, but the outline of such analyseshas neither dissolved nor dissipated it in the least. Precisely because ofthis concentration of world history, what resists analysis also calls foranother mode of thinking. If we could forget about the suffering, thehumiliation, the torture and the deaths, we might be tempted to look at


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298 JacquesDerrida Racism'sLast Wordthis region of the world as a giant tableau or painting, the screen forsome geopolitical computer. Europe, in the enigmatic process of its glob-alization and of its paradoxical disappearance, seems to project onto thisscreen, point by point, the silhouette of its internal war, the bottom lineof its profits and losses, the double-bind logic of its national and multi-national interests. Their dialectical evaluation provides only a provisionalstasis in a precarious equilibrium, one whose price today is apartheid.Allstates and all societies are still willing to pay this price, first of all bymaking someone else pay. At stake, advises the computer, are worldpeace, the general economy, the marketplace for European labor, andso on. Without minimizing the alleged "reasons of state,"we must never-theless say very loudly and in a single breath: If that's the way it is, thenthe declarations of the Western states denouncing apartheid from theheight of international platforms and elsewhere are dialecticsof denegation.With great fanfare, they are trying to make the world forget the 1973verdict-"crime against humanity." If this verdict continues to have noeffect, it is because the customary discourse on man, humanism andhuman rights, has encountered its effective and as yet unthought limit,the limit of the whole system in which it acquires meaning. AmnestyInternational: "As long as apartheid asts, there can be no structure con-forming to the generally recognized norms of human rights and able toguarantee their application."4Beyond the global computer, the dialectic of strategic or economiccalculations, beyond state-controlled, national, or international tribunals,beyond the juridico-political or theologico-political discourse, which anymore serves only to maintain good conscience or denegation, it was, itwill have to be, it is necessary to appeal unconditionally to the future ofanother law and another force lying beyond the totality of this present.This, it seems to me, is what this exhibition affirms or summonsforth, what it signs with a single stroke. Here also is what it must giveone to read and to think, and thus to do, and to give yet again, beyondthe present of the institutions supporting it or of the foundation that,in turn, it will itself become.Will it succeed? Will it make of this very thing a work? Nothing canbe guaranteed here, by definition.But if one day the exhibition wins, yes, wins its place in South Africa,it will keep the memory of what will never have been, at the moment ofthese projected, painted, assembled works, the presentation of somepresent. Even the future perfect can no longer translate the tense, thetime of what is being written in this way-and what is doubtless no longerpart of the everydaycurrent,of the cursory sense of history.Isn't this true of any "work"?Of that truth which is so difficult toput into words? Perhaps.The exemplary history of "Guernica" (name of the town, name ofa hell, name of the work) is not without analogy to the history of this


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CriticalInquiry Autumn 1985 299exhibition, to be sure; it may even have inspired the idea for the exhibition.Guernica denounces civilized barbarism, and from out of the painting'sexile, in its dead silence, one hears the cry of moaning or accusation.Brought forward by the painting, the cry joins with the children's screamsand the bombers' din, until the last day of dictatorship when the workis repatriated to a place in which it has never dwelled.To be sure: still it was the work, if one may say so, of a singleindividual, and also Picasso was addressing-not only but also and firstof all-his own country. As for the lawful rule recently reestablished inSpain, it, like that of so many countries, continues to participate in thesystem which presently assures, as we have been saying, the survival ofapartheid.Things are not the same with this exhibition. Here the single workis multiple, it crosses all national, cultural, and political frontiers. It neithercommemorates nor represents an event. Rather, it casts a continuousgaze (paintings are always gazing) at what I propose to name a continent.One may do whatever one wishes with all the senses of that word.Beyond a continent whose limits they point to, the limits surroundingit or crossing through it, the paintings gaze and call out in silence.And their silence is just. A discourse would once again compel usto reckon with the present state of force and law. It would draw upcontracts, dialecticize itself, let itself be reappropriated again.This silence calls out unconditionally; it keeps watch on that whichis not, on that which is not yet, and on the chance of still rememberingsome faithful day.

1. See Political Imprisonmentn South Africa:An Amnesty nternationalReport (London,1978).2. Howard Schissel, "La Solution de rechange lib~rale: comment concilier defense desdroits de l'homme et augmentation des profits" [The liberal alternative as solution: howto reconcile the defense of human rights with increase in profits], Le Monde diplomatique,Oct. 1979, p. 18. For the same tendency, cf. Rene Lefort, "Solidarites raciales et inter&tsde classe: composer avec les imperatifs de l'economie sans renoncer au 'developpementsepar' " [Racial solidarity and class interests: meeting economic imperatives without re-nouncing "separate development"], Le Monde diplomatique,Oct. 1979, pp. 15-16. For thesame "logic" from the labor-union point of view, see Brigitte Lachartre, "Un Systemed'interdits devenu genant" [A system of prohibitions become a nuisance], LeMondediplomatique,Oct. 1979, pp. 16-17, and Marianne Cornevin, La Ripubliquesud-africaine(Paris, 1972).3. The Fundamental Principles of Calvinist Political Science, quoted in Serge Thion, LePouvoir pdle: Essai sur le systimesud-africain(Paris, 1969).4. See Political Imprisonmentn South Africa.

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